The Sijo

A friend writes a sijo, Korean poetry form. As an ESL tutor, I wonder how I've never run across this form before. I study its structure, and the article I'm reading explains that this form is tied closely to music, like our ballad. As I try to commit this complicated structure to memory, I begin thinking about a piece I heard on NPR about music. If you look at the traditional music of a culture, you will find the rhythm and sounds of the language in that music. Think of the trills in Irish folk music, for example. I begin to see how the syllable pattern of the sijo matches the rhythm of my students' speech. I look at the translations offered as examples and wonder what they would sound like in Korean. I wonder what traditional English forms might sound like in Korean. This could be the start of a very interesting journey.